Bill vs. Obama continued in Buffalo
Posted: Monday, January 21, 2008 10:54 AM by Mark Murray
From NBC's Abby Livingston and Mark Murray
And so the fairytale -- or rather telenovela -- between Bill Clinton and Obama continued last night. Speaking at a rally in Buffalo, NY, Bill essentially accused Obama of running a cynical Nevada campaign. “[Hillary] won a victory in spite of a very well organized, and I might say a very well executed strategy by the Obama campaign, which included doing well in the north of Nevada, where his demographic of upscale voters lived, and by making an explicit effort to get Republicans to come and vote for him in the Democratic caucus.”
Bill continued, “[Obama] said President Reagan was the engine of innovation and did more, had a more lasting impact on America than I did. And then the next day he said, 'In the 90s the good ideas came out from the Republicans,” Clinton continued. “Which it'll be costly maybe down the road for him because it's factually not accurate.”
Obama, however, didn't quite say that about Reagan. Here's what he did say: "Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it." More: "I think [John] Kennedy, twenty years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we’re in one of those times right now. Where people feel like things as they are going aren’t working. We’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having, and they’re not useful. And, you know, the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom."
As for the future of the race, Clinton has set his sights on Super Tuesday. Making the campaign stop in the bitter cold of Buffalo, Clinton proved he is not taking New York for granted. In return, he implored New York not to take his wife’s campaign for granted. “New York has an election on February the 5th, and it is very important that we not to take that election for granted. That we not say, ‘Well, there won't be a big contest here, we know she's going to win. We don't have to vote.' You do have to vote, because this is a battle for delegates. And the more people who vote in New York, the more delegates she will in New York.”
“On February the 6th," he added, "all the news coverage will be who won what states, when we have all these elections. On February the 7th, all the news coverage will be who has how many delegates.”
